A MILITANT legislator wants Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes investigated over the US$1.3-million alleged “midnight deal” he signed before leaving the Department of Environment and Natural Resources last week, an act the congressman said is another case of corruption involving a high-profile government official.

Party-list Rep. Teodoro Casiño of Bayan Muna vowed to bring the issue to the Commission on Appointments to prevent Reyes’s confirmation to his new post.

“Before he [Reyes] left the Department of Environment and Natural Resources on July 31, Secretary Reyes signed a ‘midnight’ deal for the full payment of $1.3 million to a Guam-based company engaged in a failed air pollution monitoring project. This is another case of corruption involving a high-profile government official,” said Casiño.

The environmental watchdog Kalikasan-People’s Network for the Environment revealed on Friday that Reyes signed a letter of undertaking (LOU) for the DENR–Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) to pay Emissions Technology Inc. (ETI) $1,314,776.46 in back fees for the Ambient Air Monitoring Network component of a $6.2-million air monitoring project. 

The project required the setting up, maintenance and operation of 10 air quality monitoring stations throughout Metro Manila to measure ambient air [or outside air and surrounding an air pollution source location) and pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides,carbon monoxide, ozone, particulates and suspended solids.

“The LOU was received by ETI and the EMB on July 31, the same day that Reyes assumed his new position as energy secretary. Despite the DENR’s own legal and technical bureaus’ strong recommendation to terminate the project, Secretary Reyes proceeded to pay ETI the remaining balance for a useless and expensive investment that failed to produce credible data on air pollution,” Casiño said.

The LOU mandated DENR-EMB to pay ETI $1.3 million five days after ETI’s former partner, IMACH, shall have posted a performance bond of $439,114.81.

“The government has already paid $3,235,582.56 for the project that would supposedly generate reliable data on the country’s air pollution problems. The target was expanded to cover not only Metro Manila but Cavite and Pampanga. Yet the air pollution stations established on Katipunan Avenue in Quezon City, Valenzuela City, Clark Field, and Cavite State University, among others, were substandard, defective and failed to produce the needed data,” Casiño said.

“This failed project and Secretary Reyes’s questionable move to pay the foreign company deserves a thorough investigation. I intend to bring this to the CA because this should be explained before Reyes’s assignment to another department is confirmed,” he added.

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A MILITANT legislator wants Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes investigated over the US$1.3-million alleged “midnight deal” he signed before leaving the Department of Environment and Natural Resources last week, an act the congressman said is another case of corruption involving a high-profile government official.

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